In Past Show

About Gieve Patel

A physician, poet, playwright, critic, and self-taught artist, Gieve Patel has been exploring the human condition in exquisitely sensitive paintings, drawings, and sculptures for nearly half a century. Inspired by natural and urban landscapes, mythology, and current events, Patel works in series, often pursuing subjects over many years. As he explains: “[There] are things that I have seen, but I do not paint them till they have been with me in my memory and repeatedly come to my consciousness.” Blending abstraction and figuration, Patel depicts the prosaic and the poetic as well as the horrific. He has produced spare sketches from newspaper photographs of women in the throes of mourning, abstract line drawings of the movement of clouds, and conceptually driven paintings of water at the bottom of wells, a motif he has been returning to for over 20 years.